Telestream Wirecast Helps the Town of Chatham Increase Municipal Transparency to Residents

Telestream, the leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, today announced that Channel 18, the 24-hour government television station for the Town of Chatham, Massachusetts, adopted its Wirecast software as the town-wide system to record all municipal meetings and upload/archive them on the Town website. In doing so, the Town realized a 10x increase in the number of resident views of these meetings, significantly expanding local government transparency.

The Cape Cod community of Chatham had been live-streaming the meetings of seven of its 40-50 committees, commissions, and boards on Channel 18, but wanted residents to have access to all of the municipal sessions. Since A/V staff could not be present at all meetings, Channel 18 sought a town-wide recording system that could capture and upload them to the website quickly, easily, and within a $30,000 budget.

Channel 18 Media Coordinator Ryan Darmon was tasked with researching solutions. “We didn’t really come across any towns that were recording to the same extent we needed to. We looked at all kinds of things – surveillance systems, encoders, and of course a lot of recording systems. In the end, even though Wirecast is primarily used for live streaming, it has a powerful production system that allows for really easy recording. It was ideal for us.”

Channel 18 set up Wirecast recording in six conference rooms around the Town. Each includes a Dell Precision T1900 running Wirecast software, a Sony Evi-D camera, and (depending on room requirements) Sennheiser goosenecks, crown ceiling microphones, and table-installed Beyer Dynamic boundary mics. Mics run through Shure mixers into Osprey 260E video cards in the Dell PCs, and video runs directly into the cards. Each ‘kiosk’ is rack mounted in the Middle Atlantic enclosures. Users simply log into their encoder on the PC, open Wirecast, and click ‘record.’ At the close of the meeting they click ‘record’ to stop, turn off the PC remotely, then upload meetings to their archive via their CDN, Earthchannel.

“Since we’ve implemented self-serve recording, views have gone from 30,000 to over 340,000,” said Darmon. “Using Wirecast has proven to be really effective in making the Town proceedings more transparent to residents, and it has been incredibly reliable and easy to use.”

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